Articles Tagged "Norman Rogers"

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) is an important scientific society. It includes many earth science disciplines and publishes numerous journals. Unfortunately the organization has been co-opted by global warming extremists. The great majority of the scientists who study the Earth's climate don't have an extremist position on climate change. However, true believers of the "imminent catastrophe" school tend to be activists. These are the people who stay to the end of every meeting, get appointed to committees, and generally punch above their weight in organization politics. The true believers don't waver in the face of contradictory facts or data. For the true believers, ideology trumps facts.

They are agile thinkers and can always figure a method of explaining away any negative information that might disconfirm the impending climate catastrophe. The firmness with which they hold to their beliefs is similar to the unwavering confidence expressed by the flying saucer cult described in the book When Prophecy Fails. After a fleet of saucers failed to land when predicted, the cultists' belief in flying saucers and their belief that they were communicating with spacemen was unshaken. They had plenty of plausible reasons why the saucers didn't arrive. The climate catastrophe shows no signs of arriving either, except in the imagination of the activists and in the slogans of their publicists.

The "imminent catastrophe" school of global warming is in a lot of trouble. If you go back to the year 2000, things didn't look nearly as bad as they do now. The atmosphere had been warming for 30 years, as had the oceans. At least that's what the well-massaged official data said. Then everything started to fall apart. Global warming seemed to stop after 1998 and hasn't reappeared up to now. More seriously, the oceans, in the upper 700 meters stopped warming around 2003 and are still not warming. The atmosphere not warming is serious, but typically a lack of warming in the atmosphere is explained by saying that the heat is being absorbed by the ocean. But if the ocean isn't warming either, then what you have is a big headache for the promoters of global warming. (Some scientists are trying to find missing heat below 700 meters, a dubious proposition.) The imminent catastrophe school finessed the bad news.

The typical doomsday cult believes that an apocalyptic disaster is imminent. When the disaster fails to arrive, the cult faces a psychological disaster from which it may or may not recover by announcing a new and later date for doom to arrive. The advocates of apocalyptic global warming have a lot in common with doomsday cults1. Compared to the typical doomsday cult, the global warming cultists are better-educated and use the jargon of science to make their beliefs sound reasonable. The global warmers have the special advantage of generous government financing. Billions of dollars of government money is spent on climate research and low-carbon energy schemes. The money buys impressive political support.

An iron triangle, in political usage, describes a strong lobbying interest with three mutually supporting components. The iron triangle of interests that promotes government support for global warming consists of big science, environmental organizations, and alternative energy industries.

The advocates of global warming are beginning to have the classic doomsday cult problem. The Earth hasn't been warming for 16 years, and that's starting to get very embarrassing. The first adjustment to the dogma was to stop talking about global warming and start talking about climate change. The latest version of the party line is that we are going to have more extreme weather. The reality is that the weather is not any more variable or extreme than in the past. But with suitable fishing in the data, it is easy to make a case that this or that weather phenomenon has become more extreme.

My dirty secret is that I'm a member of the Sierra Club. I joined at the $15 rate for retired senior citizens and received a bonus shoulder bag. The Sierra Club idolizes nature and demonizes man. It glorifies economic parasitism and practices junk science. I joined because I am investigating the environmentalist movement, and I wanted to get their e-mails.

The Sierra Club has an $84-million budget and 1.4 million members. Probably most of the members are more interested in singles hikes than in environmental extremism. I attended a presentation featuring Michael Brune, the club's recently appointed executive director. The presentation was held at the exclusive Metropolitan Club on floors 66 and 67 of the Willis Tower in Chicago. The Willis Tower is the tallest building in the United States (110 stories) and was formerly known as the Sears Tower.

Michael Bloomberg is mayor of New York and a billionaire 18 times over. Bloomberg Philanthropies co-sponsored the presentation. That may explain why the drinks were free. Bloomberg recently gave the Sierra Club $50 million to support their beyond coal campaign. The beyond coal campaign aims to shut down electric generating plants that burn coal and that provide about 50% of the electricity in the U.S. The beyond coal campaign should be called the beyond electricity campaign because the Sierra Club is against all practical sources of electricity, favoring instead windmills and solar electricity.

Imagine that you are a climate scientist and the Earth is threatened with a climate disaster. You need to warn the people of Earth and lobby Earth's governments. If you are tired of poring over boring computer printouts, you may be only too ready to accept this mission of transcendent importance.

On the other hand, maybe you have lost touch with reality. Maybe you have become a true believer fighting a dubious battle. Maybe you are Dr. James Hansen, high civil servant, recipient of cash awards from left-wing foundations, and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Hansen was arrested in front of the White House, dressed up to look like J. Robert Oppenheimer, the 1950s scientific martyr. Hansen wants CEOs of energy companies to be prosecuted for "crimes against humanity."

When scientists are fanatical believers in a cause, the authority and credibility that attach to science are turned into political capital to be spent in pursuit of that cause.

The late Stephen Schneider, Stanford climate scientist, explained how this works:

French philosophers invented deconstructionism and postmodernism, or the theory that nothing means what it says. Followers of these ideas are adept at finding hidden messages of capitalist oppression in the most unexpected places. A related ideological disturbance is post-normal science. Post-normal scientists favor relaxing scientific rigor in order to better pursue political goals. Those goals often involve a reorganization of society that will elevate the importance of scientists. Archimedes supposedly said, Give me a long enough lever and I can move the world. The post-normal scientists think that science is a lever that can be used to rule the world.

Certain important climate scientists are very eager to reorganize society. They proclaim, on weak evidence, that the Earth is doomed by global warming unless we follow a green plan to remake the economy and the social order. We have to give up cars for trolleys. Windmills will become ubiquitous. The most famous climate scientist, James Hansen, wants to put his opponents on trial for crimes against humanity.[i] Implicit in all this is the idea that a central committee of Dr. Strangeloves should rule the world. Instead of prince this and duke that, we will have doctor this and doctor that. These radical intellectuals secretly despise the present system of rule by the rabble, otherwise known as democracy.

Some intellectuals think that they don't get attention and status commensurate with their importance. This is especially true in America, where the cleaning lady or plumber is inclined to treat them as equals. One way to be important is to proclaim a theory that something very bad is going to happen. If the theory has some scientific basis and is backed by other prominent scientists, the claims will be credible.

Global warming, now called climate change, is a big industry with academic and commercial branches. One way or another the government provides the money to keep it in business. The academic side supports thousands of scientific workers churning out some good science larded with lots of junk science. The commercial side is busy turning out tank cars filled with corn ethanol and covering the landscape with windmills. Nobody would be doing any of this without government subsidies and mandates. A recent example of how the geniuses in Washington direct policy is the loaning of hundreds of millions to electric car companies like Tesla. Tesla is the stock that everyone is going to be trying to short when they aren't trying to short First Solar.

Some of this government support is direct, such as the 1.8 cents per kilowatt hour subsidy for windmill electricity. But much is mandated by regulations that result in increased consumer prices -- a hidden tax. For example utilities may be required to generate a certain percentage of their electricity from green sources such as windmills. Since the electricity from these sources is expensive, prices to the consumer must be raised.

Why the government even bothers trying to reduce CO2 emissions is a mystery. Rising CO2 emissions from China and the rest of Asia make any efforts to reduce CO2 emissions in the U.S. irrelevant. The numbers and trends are very obvious on this point. China currently generates 1/4 as much electricity per capita as the U.S. and China has 4 times the population. This suggests that China could eventually increase its electricity generation by a factor of 16 to match the per capita electricity usage enjoyed in the U.S. In the single year 2010 electricity production grew 15% in China, a pace that would double production in 5 years. Electricity in China comes mainly from coal, the indigenous fuel available in large quantities and the most CO2 emitting fuel.

According to the government's Global Change Research Program, the oceans will rise three to four feet [i] by the year 2100. Ice-covered Greenland is the top candidate to supply the water. The big ice sheets in Antarctica are too cold, and the mountain glaciers aren't big enough to realistically add that much water to the oceans.

It became possible to get a good handle on the melting of Greenland only when the GRACE satellites were launched in 2002. These satellites measure changes in the Earth's gravity and are able to measure changes in the mass of the Greenland ice sheet.

An ice sheet has a dynamic balance. Snow falls on the ice, and as it stacks higher, that snow turns into more ice. The great mass of ice, thousands of feet thick, flows like plastic toward the sea at a speed measured in feet per year. At the edge of the Greenland ice sheet, the altitude is lower, and temperatures during the summer are high enough to melt ice. Some of the ice melts, and the water runs into the sea. The rest of the ice loss is from moving glaciers that drop icebergs into the sea. Rising temperatures encourage faster flow and more melting, but rising temperatures also encourage more snow. Warmth encourages snow as long as it doesn't get too warm.

Can scientists become "Deadly Ninjas of Science Communication"? That was proposed by Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War Against Science," and a member of the board of directors of the American Geophysical Union. Mooney advocated this idea in a presentation at the Union's December 13-17 fall meeting in San Francisco.

Mooney is concerned that global warming skeptics are getting the upper hand in the ongoing debate. Mooney has an unquestioning belief that disaster will overtake the world if we don't mend our CO2-emitting ways. Many other speakers at the meeting, like Mooney, suggested that if scientists improved their communications skills, the skeptics could be defeated.

At the same fall meeting four years ago, Al Gore spoke to ten thousand assembled scientists. The scientists treated him like a rock star. Why would the scientists love Al Gore? His movie, An Inconvenient Truth, was full of scientific errors. But this is about not biting the hand that feeds you. When Al Gore spreads global warming hysteria, financial and political support for climate science increases. Scientists become guests on TV shows instead of lab drones.

But a dark cloud is gathering over climate science. Public fear of global warming is declining. Most of the activist scientists gathered in San Francisco were blind to the possibility that there is any defect in their scary product. It must be that forces of darkness (perhaps Republicans or coal companies) are financing skeptics. Apparently the skeptics, cleverly disguised as grassroots activists, have an uncanny knack for propaganda.

I spent my working life as a computer engineer and entrepreneur. I have a long history of tilting at windmills having been involved in numerous causes and crusades during my life. So when my retirement started it was natural for me to look for something to get involved with. I picked global warming. Since I had completed the course work for a Ph.D. in physics I felt that I could deal with the technical side of global warming theory. As a computer expert I though that I would have insight to the giant computer models of the earth's climate that are central to global warming science.

I smelled a rat right from the beginning. As a 20-something activist I had a job as the Director of Operations for Zero Population Growth, Inc. ZPG was a 70's environmental organization that at one time had 25,000 members. I knew that professional environmentalism has an ethics problem. Exaggeration promotes contributions.

In my quest to investigate and understand global warming I joined the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. At scientific meetings, like an anthropologist, I cultivated native informants.

I learned that most scientists don't have a good grasp of the big picture because they are narrowly specialized and don't think about much outside of their immediate interests. The scientists that do have a grasp of the big picture can be divided into global warming advocates, skeptics and the majority of passive observers who play it safe by not taking a position. The global warming advocates have the upper hand and the most power. The skeptics, including quite a few excellent scientists, are marginalized and frankly persecuted. They are whistle blowers. A lot of skeptics are retired. The warmers can't cancel pensions, at least not yet. The most famous promoter of global warming, James Hansen, wants to put his opponents on trial for crimes against humanity.